Posts Tagged ‘recordings’

“More and more people are buying vinyl; sales hit a record 6.1 million units in the U.S. last year. But as demand increases, the number of American pressing plants remains relatively fixed. No one is building new presses because, by all accounts, it would be prohibitively expensive. So the industry is limited to the dozen or so plants currently operating in the States.”

(“You Ain’t Nothin’ But a) Hound Dog” first became a hit 6o years ago.

“The song was born in the famed Brill Building of New York, written by two Jewish teenagers named Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber. They had intended it, Leiber later recalled, for a female blues singer, and though they had several candidates in mind, it was Willie Mae Thornton who first took it into the studio on August 13, 1952. Big Mama, as she was known, growled that the songwriters were ‘a couple of kids,’ but the great bandleader Johnny Otis put her through her paces with several takes even as she tinkered with the lyrics, threw in a few suggestive howls, and changed the accent to make ‘Hound Dog’ wholly her own.”

DC band Fugazi (founded 1987) has been on “permanent hiatus” since 2003, but their concerts are going global. Discord Records is putting digitizing audio tapes of 800 live Fugazi shows on its Web site. There already were 130 shows up there in the Beta version, and the site went public today as Fugazi Live Series.

The band is known for insisting on low prices and trusting its fans, and the archive is in keeping with that DIY, all-ages-access philosophy. It’s pay what you can/pay what you like, with each recording at a suggested price of $5 per show and a sliding scale of $1 to $100.

Like the music recording awards show itself, most GRAMMY® nominations are tiresome, but one of tonight’s nominees stands out. It’s an ever-changing music video with singing by a dead man and drawings by two hundred thousand of his admirers across the globe. The video above is just a snapshot of The Johnny Cash Project. Go to the site itself for a richer experience. You can even become part of it by making a drawing. Learn more about the crowd-sourced production from some of its contributors after the jump.

A few years ago, U.S. agents tortured people and videotaped these “enhanced interrogations.” They also made people disappear at “black sites” around the world. When investigators started poking around, the recordings disappeared, too.

Why destroy the tapes? Despite assurances from the Department of Justice and the White House, waterboarding and similar practices are torture, against federal, military, and international law. The cover-up shows the interrogators knew this.